Magnavox
Magnavox traces back to the laboratory of Edwin Pridham and Peter L. Jensen in Napa, California, where the two co-invented the moving-coil loudspeaker. Their firm, formed in 1911, merged with the Sonora Phonograph Distributor Company in July 1917 to create Magnavox. By the 1930s manufacturing had moved to Fort Wayne, Indiana.
For most American households Magnavox meant furniture: radio-phonograph consoles and, later, televisions in wooden cabinets. The amplifiers inside the stereo consoles of the late 1950s and 1960s were compact tube designs, and many have since been pulled from their cabinets and rebuilt as stand-alone amplifiers. North American Philips took a majority stake in 1974 and full ownership in 1975.
The archive has the 8802 6V6 stereo amplifier and the much older 1921 AC-2.
In 1910 Magnavox started as “Commercial Wireless & Development Company” at Napa, California. Peter L. Jansen, Edwin S. Pridham (both ex Federal Telegraph Company) and Richard O’Connor (finance) formed the company to achieve a sensitive telephone receiver. In 1915 Jensen and Pridham have put a horn to their “telephone receiver with moving-coil system” and then used it as a “Fog-Horn” for the local baseball park (Radio & TV News, February 1959). They called it Magna Vox. They developed the “SE4005 noise-cancelling microphone” for aircraft intercoms. In 1919 Magnavox moved from 526 Mission Street, San Francisco to 14th Street in Oakland and made vacuum-tube power amplifiers. In February 1920 Magnavox introduced a radio speaker, forerunner of the 1921 Model R-3. 1924 Magnavox began also to produce a tube “A” with a special design and a year later also radios.
